When one gives up living and using his soul, he can’t only lose the soul but can also devote it to death… Before souls completely die they stick in The Void – an odd space between life and death. There is an outside chance to survive in The Void and even to come back from it.

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"Surreal adventure game dealing with light, dark and survival."

About This Game

When one gives up living and using his soul, he can’t only lose
the soul but can also devote it to death…
Before souls completely die they stick in The Void – an odd space
between life and death. There is an outside chance to survive
in The Void and even to come back from it. This chance is
The Color – the only food of a dying soul wandering through
the mournful realms of The Void, governed by monstrous Brothers
and malicious Sisters, who are desperately struggling for the
last drops of it. The Color is not only the sense of life of these
mysterious creatures but also gives power and vital force to the
whole Void. The Color gives you power to do almost everything
even to get out of death clutches if you gain enough Color, but
there is a great lack of it in the arid deserts of The Void. There is
Color only for one.
Be the one, get your lost soul back!

The Color is the only resource in the game: it acts as the health,
inventory, skills and perks system, armory.

All in-game actions are realized through drawing. You literally
need to draw your way with your own blood.

Each Color can cause both harm and good. A player gets various
advantages from getting any of The Colors, but when he draws
with it he feeds the enemy forces of the world.

Fight with golems, bloodthirsty predators and other spawns
of The Void.

62 hours to finish this game via the most difficult route, although I didn't chose the most difficult route because it was the most difficult route. Nevertheless, I am one stubborn son of a ♥♥♥♥♥ even though I really, really wanted to quit the game as it felt terribly hopeless.

Sixty two hours of terror, wonder, and painfully frustrating gameplay. I couldn't even believe I made it. Yet, it's not 62 hours of game content, but 62 hours of scraping to get through and repeating the same sections over and over and readjusting for the thousandth time your strategy and inventory and if you make a mistake down the line, you might have to restart from HOURS back.

I saved my game 302 times. I must have reloaded my game AT LEAST triple that many times. In this game there is zero margin of error. Literally, very, very literally every second counts.

You literally have no time to breathe when you are not inside a chamber. The time management system is extremely flawed and frustrating. From the very second you load your game, you cannot waste a single solitary second doing anything except proceeding in exactly in the most efficient direction and having the most efficient inventory setup while spending any second in the void unpaused.

The pause system is incredibly frustrating as well. You're not just fighting the game. You're fighting the game design. I could think of many ways the system could be improved. Such as letting you see the contents of chambers without having to unpause. Allowing you to pause without having to hold down the color palette. Auto pausing on every move between chambers. Letting you view your Lympha, Heart, and Nerva levels, or give some indication of the situation without having to go to the body screen as time only moves in the void map screen. Seeing as so much of the game happens in real time, letting you view the levels you need to keep an eye constantly should be a given. Also, considering how devastating any bad move or decision can be it is absolutely madness that don't give you better ways to keep track of the situations.

The description of this game doesn't do it justice. The depth, thought, and calculation required by the player is on the level with some very demanding and serious puzzle and strategy games, even if the design is not. The most demanding aspect of this game is the logistics and that's where most of the problems occur.

Also, this game won't let you save in chambers and it seems it would be tremendously time saving and advantageous and less frustrating, repetitive and terrible to just have the game auto-save when entering a chamber and auto-save when starting a boss battle. Just why they thought that having to readjust all of your inventory any time you need to restart something would be a fun way to play the game.

It's almost impossible to make any informed decisions without wasting valuable resources and time, hence the numerous reloads as the only way to know what you have to do is to actually visit the chambers and see what's available in each one before devising your plan and then reloading to implement it from an earlier time as any wasted second is likely to mean failure.

The inventory system is extremely badly designed and time-consuming. Instead of just choosing which color your using and filling various hearts from it. You have to constantly go back to the same color and wait for it each time it fills up. After reloading and repeating this hundreds of times it has become the most hated part of this game for the simple fact that it could have been done so much easier and less time consuming.

The ideas for this game are brilliant and interesting and original, but the way they are implemented is horrible. I don't know what kind of testing they did before releasing this but seriously? A game where saving and reloading is 99% of what you do is a good idea?

Save after every move and hope that you won't have to reload again. I used guides for lots of help as there was very little information about what to do in the game and how to proceed. This game is nigh impossible without help from guides. That, to me is also a major game flaw. How can you release a game that simply requires an entirely seperate guide from other players before you have any hope of making any progress?

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Part 2.

The story is incredibly interesting. It's dark and alien at the same time. By far one of the most immersive experiences I've ever had. I had a sense that the game was full of metaphors (or perhaps it's just my own associations) and yet the void felt like a place of it's own. The void is it's own reality. Metaphors aside, the place feels real. I don't mean each individual chamber, but the characters, the dialogue, the lore; the literature.

The Void had me mystefied as I analyzed or just wondered about the nature of it's world, it's many creatures and characters and the protaganist. It is truly strange, yet it doesn't trade the bizarre for real feeling, even if bizarre is the feeling you get from the place and situation. There is something horrible and terrifying and even beautiful about this dark place. I hardly feel like I can do it justice in that regard. Just how deep and immersive, strange and beautiful the story is.

There are elements to the story and game which remind me of ideas from the books of Carlos Castaneda. If you haven't read many of those books, then you have no idea what I'm talking about, but there's no way I'm getting into that in this review.

The Void has you making choices and also makes you feel the weight of those choices and their consequences. Once you've started on one path there is really no turning back.

The Void tells you, through various dialogue and/or narratives or just shows you, the hopelessness of the void. It's sets you to do the impossible, which is mirrored in the gameplay. I'm not sure what kind of experience I would have gotten had the gameplay been easier. The desperation for resources is a central theme and to coax that feeling in the player it is implemented in a desperate and nigh impossible journey.

Even if I liked the game, I wasn't ready for a 62 hour grind. The story and experience were definitely real in their own way. I thought it would be more explorative and less super hard work. I have to be more careful. Starting a game like this that the gameplay sucks but the core is something I can appreciate ends with me grinding away because I can't give up on the experience, story, challenge... something. Something always piques my interest or someting obsesses me and I have to see the damn thing through.

An interesting game concept and design, but executed poorly. Grinding to manage your colours whilst you figure out what to do was faster at the beginning and now I just don't want to get back into it. It's going so slowly that I forget where I'm up to when I pick up play again. The writhing 'sisters' are attractive, but enough is enough already. I don't need to interact with that level of depravity so often. Why are they all the same with different coloured lighting? Ugh, I got really sick of having to visit them. To sum up, it really had me intrigued but the grind and writhe and dramatic slowing of play really got to me and left me disinterested. Did the developers only play the first few hours of the game themselves? Then just skip to the more interesting parts to 'play test' without realising what real play through would be like?

A very, very strange game. Gorgeous art design and storycrafting let down by some obtuse and unforgiving mechanics, The Void makes for a unique experience. Just a little more attention to the execution would have made this a real classic.

Best enjoyed with a guide to the basic mechanics- so as to avoid painting yourself into an inescapable corner (literally)- but without spoiling the twists. Not a good choice if you're uninterested in suffering past the rough patches.